Obama's mosque moment irks Dems

A week after President Barack Obama decided to publicly back the lower Manhattan mosque, his words are still reverberating, offering insight into his brand of pragmatic idealism and posing a gap between Obama and other top Democrats.

Obama’s support of the Park51 community center, less than three months before a bitterly contested midterm election, would have sparked a huge Republican backlash in any event. But the impact of the decision on Democrats, with many frantically distancing themselves from Obama, has given the story real resonance and the longest of news-cycle legs.

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The president’s decision — made with the support of senior advisers Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod, his two closest friends in the West Wing — reflected Obama’s forcefulness on issues closest to his heart, a willingness to jettison calculation when core beliefs are in play.

But it also revealed Obama’s near-addiction to the teachable moment, a determination to lead his party by example instead of engaging, consulting or even informing the Democratic elites of his actions before acting.

Tellingly, aides to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg knew about Obama’s decision before staffers for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and New York’s two senators, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, learned about it.

One senior Democratic congressional staffer on the Hill learned that Obama was “injecting the mosque story into the national bloodstream” when someone e-mailed him a transcript of Obama’s remarks as he was settling into his seat at a Washington Nationals game.

Pelosi, a San Francisco liberal with a passion for free speech issues, strongly backed Obama’s position and neither Gillibrand nor Schumer were particularly bothered by the lack of a head’s up, according to Democratic aides.

But others were annoyed to learn, late that Friday, that Obama had told Muslim leaders at the White House that he backed the Park51 project because organizers "have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country."

They were even more surprised Saturday, as were West Wing aides, when Obama backed off the comments in an off-the-cuff remark to a CNN reporter, saying he wasn’t weighing in on the wisdom of the project, only the developer’s right to go forward.

And Reid, according to Democratic sources, probably would not have weighed in on the plan to build the mosque and community center just north of ground zero, had Obama not spoken publicly. But with no heads-up and facing a bitter reelection battle in Nevada, he quickly announced his opposition to the project.

In doing so Reid sent a subtle, but unmistakable message to the president by informing the White House hours in advance of the majority leader’s statement.

The crowning irony for Obama is that the road to compromise on the mosque leads to the Democrat he’s alienated the most: Lame-duck New York Gov. David Paterson, whose reelection bid Obama opposed.

Obama acolytes and even Democratic detractors say they admire the president’s willingness to sacrifice his own popularity for principle.